Whitepaper marketing guide: create lead magnets!
Whitepapers are a content format that not only generates leads, but also boosts brand awareness and reinforces your expert status. Download our free guide to find out everything you need to know about whitepaper marketing!
Marketing with a whitepaper: definition and implementation at an expert level
Whitepapers originally stem from the political world and are documents that present specially compiled information, proposals, and recommendations about a certain issue.
Whitepapers have now become established in the marketing field for presenting specialized topics, studies, or data as well as providing interested parties with practical instructions, checklists, or guides. As a professional publication for other experts in a particular field, occasionally also for novices, whitepapers are written at the level of a specialist readership. Leads are generated by prospective customers providing their email address in return for the PDF document.
The advantages of whitepaper content marketing
Although creating a whitepaper is relatively costly and time-consuming, a whitepaper marketing campaign can pay off in many ways. A useful whitepaper lets you
- reinforce your expert status,
- boost your brand awareness,
- increase the trust and reputation enjoyed by your company over the long term,
- impart knowledge,
- communicate inspiration, and
- prepare for sales (important: no self-promoting!)
Whitepaper marketing for strategic corporate communication
As can be seen from the advantages listed above, the benefits that whitepaper marketing offers you are long-lasting. It is important that a whitepaper isn’t promotional itself, but rather should be adapted to your content marketing strategy as an element of corporate communication – namely at a professional or technical level. A whitepaper is all about you seriously addressing a topic, study, or trend and thus sharing your specialized expertise with other professionals and giving them valuable input.
The more carefully you put a whitepaper together, the more quickly readers will trust in the expertise and credibility of your company, and on a lasting basis.
To ensure that the information in the whitepaper provides valuable input, it should explore a well-known topic from a new angle, reveal trends, or present new findings. Practically oriented content can lend tangible support to others in their day-to-day work. By adopting such a whitepaper marketing strategy, you can indirectly optimize your conversion rate – with absolutely no advertising.
Whitepaper marketing examples: win over customers through quality content
When it comes to whitepapers, the content spectrum is huge. Your focus will depend on what you want to achieve with the content. Do you want to tackle a new topic and be a pioneer? Or do you want to showcase your creativity by addressing an issue in a new way or presenting it in a unique form? Or is your goal to show that you have a good understanding of a topic and keep on top of the trends? Depending on your objective, some formats will be more suitable than others.
Here are some typical whitepaper formats
- Best practices or case studies
- Guides or how-tos
- Studies and study results in summarized form
- In-depth exploration of a specialized topic, including data
- Description of a process
- Presentation of hypotheses and forecasts
In our whitepaper marketing guide, we walk you through how to create a whitepaper and what you have to consider in terms of both the content and format.
